Monthly Archives: December 2013

America is not a uniform country. Its residents come from all over the world, bringing their unique cultures and languages with them. And over the centuries and across the vast distances that make up the country, new linguistic differences have grown. How we speak reveals much about where we grew up or spent parts of our lives. As a New York Times interactive site clearly shows, just by answering questions about which words we use, a computer can predict with startling accuracy where we come from.

The questions asked by the language survey reveal some of the biggest varieties in how Americans pronounce common words and which vocabulary we use in certain situations. For example, is a carbonated beverage a soda, pop, or coke (regardless of the brand)? For us on the East Coast, it sounds weird to hear “pop”, but now I’ve met enough Midwesterners that I’ve gotten used to it.

How about the pronunciation of “aunt”? To me, the “a” should sound like “ahh”, but I most often hear it said like “ant” in the movies. What I originally thought was standard English is perhaps just a regional New England-ish quirk.

And then there’s “y’all”, the preferred Southern construction used when addressing more than one person. Oddly, I started saying this as a kid, even though no one around me did. It just seemed like the most convenient way to talk to multiple people, rather than saying something like “you guys”, which doesn’t sound right to me. This was probably my only response in the quiz that linked me to the Southern US rather than the Northeast, and may be responsible for the swath of red and orange through Virginia and North Carolina.

I find it remarkable that we can take something as personal as our way of speaking and create a map that shows where we fit linguistically in the country. How did the New York Times accomplish this? Here’s how the site explains it:

“Most of the questions used in this quiz are based on those in the Harvard Dialect Survey, a linguistics project begun in 2002 by Bert Vaux and Scott Golder. The original questions and results for that survey can be found on Dr. Vaux’s current website. The data for the quiz and maps shown here come from over 350,000 survey responses collected from August to October 2013 by Josh Katz, a graphics editor for the New York Times who developed this quiz. The colors on the large heat map correspond to the probability that a randomly selected person in that location would respond to a randomly selected survey question the same way that you did.”

Check it out for yourself and create your own dialect map. Is yours accurate?

Christmas is coming in just a few days, so I’ve decided to dissect and explain some of the aspects of this holiday… with maps, of course!

First, let’s not forget that the original basis for Christmas is the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem around the year 1 AD (give or take a few years). At the time, Bethlehem and most of the area we now know as Israel was called Judea, a client kingdom of the Roman Empire which soon became the Roman province of Iudaea. According to the gospels, Jesus was born in Bethlehem, which is West of the Dead Sea and a little south of Jerusalem, but Mary and Joseph soon had to flee with him to Egypt to avoid a massacre of infant boys ordered by King Herod. After leaving Egypt, they settled in Nazareth, a city in the region of Galilee, to the north. Below is a map of the region at the time:

1st Century Judea (via wikipedia)

Christianity had humble origins, with Jesus being born in a manger, but it quickly grew in popularity and spread around the world. The cultural impact of Christianity is so great that Christmas is even celebrated by many non-christians in a variety of countries. In Vietnam, for example, a country where only 8% of the population is Christian, Christmas decorations are ubiquitous and holiday cheer is high throughout December (even though there’s little chance of snow).

As the map below shows, the list of countries where Christmas is not observed at all is pretty small:

Map of Countries that do not recognize Christmas as a Public Holiday (via wikipedia)

Speaking of snow, is anyone else dreaming of a White Christmas? Alas, where I live, I cannot always count on it, and this year it does not seem likely to happen. Even though we had a great deal of snow last week, warmer temperatures and rain are melting it away, and there is no snow predicted from now until Christmas. Will you have a White Christmas this year? Here’s a handy map put together by the National Weather Service which shows the historical probability of a White Christmas in different parts of the United States:

White Christmas probability map (via NOAA)

Along with snow, another big part of the Christmas season is Santa Claus, who delivers presents to all the good boys and girls (and coal for the bad ones). But different countries have different ideas of just who the annual gift bringer is. Some places (such as Greece) say it’s a saint, others (like Ukraine) say it’s Grandfather Frost, and then you have more creative versions such as the Biblical Magi (Spain) or the Yule Goat (Finland). Who would you rather come down your chimney this year?

The names of Santa (via Buzzfeed)

Speaking of Santa, did you know that NORAD tracks the location of Santa’s sleigh every Christmas Eve? If you want to see where he is in his trip around the world this year, you can track it here: http://www.noradsanta.org/

Christmas is a time not just for presents, but also sitting down with family and friends and enjoying a meal together. In my family, we usually have a roast of some kind, like beef or pork, but unlike Thanksgiving or Easter, we don’t have a set traditional food. I know that lots of Americans have turkey or chicken or ham. What do people in other countries have? Here’s our final map, of traditional Christmas dinners around the world:

We recently passed the one year anniversary of the undiscovery of Sandy Island, a sad fate for the phantom island which managed to persist on maps for centuries even though it never existed in the first place. As we’ve seen before with the fictional Mountains of Kong and the Island of California, sometimes false geographical features are reproduced on maps for many years even though they remain unverified. What’s most striking here, though, is the fact that Sandy Island continued to appear on maps into the 21st Century, and even showed up on Google Earth, even though no one had ever seen it.

How could such an error have made been made, and repeated again and again? James Cook first put Sandy Island on a map in 1774, and a later whaling ship seemed to verify his false sighting when it spotted floating pumice from an underwater volcano. Subsequent maps of the region included the tiny island with the humble, unassuming name. In 1979, the French Hydraulic Service disproved its existence and removed it from its charts, but it somehow survived on other charts. It even remained on the World Vector Shoreline Database for decades afterwards, and Google added it to Google Earth. A search of the island would show a blank, darkened area of sea.

Because of the island’s remote location and small size (15 miles by 3 miles), it was able to escape undiscovery for many years. But in November, 2012, an Australian surveyor ship passed through that area to try to clear up some discrepancies in their charts, and they determined that no such island existed at that location. Once they made this undiscovery, Sandy Island was finally taken off the map by Google and National Geographic, and the cartographers of the digital age all had a little taste of humility.

The takeaway: Although there may be no new places to discover on earth, we’re still undiscovering places we used to think existed. Now get out there and prove those old cartographers wrong!

At 925 pages, Haruki Murakami’s “1Q84” is a beast of a book. The pacing is mostly glacial, with occasional spurts of excitement. The story meanders through a series of fantastical elements, many of which are ultimately unexplained. And it is full of Murakami’s favorite tropes: attention to the shape of ears, meticulously detailed accounts of food preparation, and the mysterious habits of cats, to name just a few.

But unlike Murakami’s other novels, which are mostly critically adored in his native Japan and around the world, 1Q84 is polarizing. A New York Times review by Janet Maslin panned it, calling it “stupefying”. A sizable portion of Amazon customers and Goodreads readers were turned off by it as well, with several vowing never to open another Murakami novel again.

Nevertheless, I still recommend this book… with reservations.

1Q84 takes place in Tokyo in the year 1984, but it quickly shifts into an alternate timeline dubbed “1Q84” by one of the characters. In Japanese, the word for “nine” sounds like “Q”, so there’s some wordplay which is lost on Western readers. The intended meaning is that it’s a year with a question mark, which is an apt symbol to describe the whole book. As in most of Murakami’s books, there are strange, powerful forces at work in this world which draw the main characters into deeply confusing, highly perilous situations.

The protagonists are Aomame, a fitness instructor and sometimes assassin (but for a good cause), and Tengo, a writer who takes on a shady ghostwriting assignment. The point of view switches between the two throughout the novel, so we see how both sides of their stories play out for several chapters before they each find themselves endangered by a violent religious cult with connections to a group of mysterious supernatural figures called the Little People. It gets more and more ridiculous from there, as Aomame and Tengo struggle both to understand what’s going on and figure out how to survive.

Unfortunately, the book does leave many questions unanswered, which can be very frustrating. As the plot moves along, events become progressively illogical, but only by our own standards of reality. By the internal logic of 1Q84, it seems to make sense, and I could not find any holes in the complicated plot. I found that the best way to deal with all the unexplained phenomena was just to suspend my disbelief and enjoy the ride.

1Q84 is very long, and perhaps several chapters could even be cut entirely. In the last third in particular, it seems to drag on, when the action should be building more quickly. However, I enjoyed the writing so much that I did not mind the length. The characters’ personalities are deep and complex, and the style is clear and vivid. I read the book slowly, in fits and starts, over the better part of the year. Generally, I read a few pages, maybe a chapter, before bed. To me, the experience was less about seeing how the plot resolved, but more about the feeling of being transported inside that world. A common theme is solitude; almost all of the characters are alone, and they thoughtfully consider their situations as they go about their lives. Murakami describes in detail how they prepare food, what they wear, how they schedule their days, etc. Some readers have called this out as boring and repetitive, but I found it deeply enchanting. There is something profound about the mundane. After all, it’s how we spend most of our lives. I greatly appreciated how this book kept its tone very grounded and contemplative, even as this seemingly normal world grappled with magic and fantasy.

By all means, give 1Q84 a try, especially if you have read other books by Murakami. For those who haven’t, I recommend starting with one of his earlier novels, such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, to get a sense for what he’s all about. His genre is hard to describe; it’s sort of a postmodern blend of magical realism, urban fantasy, and science fiction. That’s part of what draws me to his novels again and again. Since he defies easy classification, and his plots are always completely off the wall, you never quite know what’s lurking on the next page.

A new study by researchers at UPenn reveals that the hippocampus not only stores our memories, but it also “geotags” them.

In the experiment, participants played a videogame in a virtual town where they were asked to deliver objects to stores. Once the participant delivered the object, he would learn what the object was, and then be given the next assignment. When asked later to recall which objects were delivered, the part of the participant’s brain associated with the memory of the store was activated, meaning that the memory of the object was inextricably linked to the location.

It’s a little confusing, but very fascinating how the researchers were able to actually determine this. First, they would let the participant roam around the virtual world, and the researchers would note which cells inside the participant’s hippocampus were activated as the participant visited each store. By the end of the roaming, the researchers had a neural map of the participant’s hippocampus, where they knew which cells represented which stores, such that by recalling a specific store, the researchers could detect electrical activity in the neural cell associated with that store. The neural map would look something like this:

After the participants delivered the objects to the stores, these neural cells not only activated when the participant remembered the store, but also when the participant remembered the object delivered to the store. Essentially, the participant had geotagged the location in his brain, much like our phones can automatically geotag the specific location of a picture we take. Pretty cool, huh? This helps explain why I cannot help but think of the place where I first experienced a taste or smell when I recall that sensation; for example, I cannot recall the smell of fish sauce without picturing the kitchen in my house in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Somewhere in my brain must be a tiny neural cell that represents that kitchen, and it lights up at the mention of fish sauce.

So remember that the hippocampus is the little cartographer inside us all, recording our memories while connecting them with the specific places where we experienced them.

You can read the full article here: http://www.upenn.edu/pennnews/news/memories-are-geotagged-spatial-information-penn-researchers-say